Pandemoniac Pages

Monday, July 15, 2013

CYBELE



CYBELE
"Anchester had been the camp of the third Augustan legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that the temple of Cybele was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest."

"The reference to Atys made me shiver, for I had read Catullus and knew something of the hideous rites of the Eastern god, whose worship was so mixed with that of Cybele."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats In the Walls 

"The figure is that of a woman, her bare feet on a plain round base. She is wearing a long, sleeveless dress that suggests a toga but that would not look out of place against a number of backdrops. Her plump arms are bend at the elbows, her hands crossed over a belly that swells with a child ready to make its entry into the world."

"It is headless, deliberately so: the neck shows a cross-section of bone, throat, muscle, blood vessels."

"The Greeks had her from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, where she was known as Cybele, the Mother of the Mountain. She is very ancient and very terrible. He had opened one of the books and was turning onionskin pages. Les mysteres du ver, he said, 
nodding at the volume."
John Langan, Mother Of Stone 

"KYBELE (or Cybele) was the great Phrygian Mother of the Gods, a primal nature goddess worshiped with orgiastic rites in the mountains of central and western Anatolia."
Aaron J. Atsma, The Theoi Project: Greek Mythology 

 

3 comments:

  1. Wow, she's like a walking fountain you see at public parks and rich people houses. Let's hope she is not on a vampire's menu. I wonder what her face would look like.

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